Wednesday, 9 August 2017

Book Review: Jinnah Often Came to our House, by Kiran Doshi

[I had almost sworn off reviewing books altogether. But this book, the winner of The Hindu Literary Prize, 2016 could not be resisted - this review virtually wrote itself in a single burst of typing, extracted from fingers throbbing with pain]

About History

I might never have liked writing exams on the
subject, but I rather liked History otherwise. Maybe we had good teachers, or
good text-books, but there was something grand about the whole thing – Kings
and Wars, inspiring figures from history – it felt like reading stories, and
that made it fun. It was in a history class (or rather, from reading the
textbook before term began) that I first came to know about Leonidas’ last
stand, the defiance of Boudicca, the shrewd coalition-building of Chanakya and
the daredevilry of Shivaji and his mavlas.

By the time we were prepping for the Board exams, the
focus was on a part of history that perhaps seems to pale by comparison – the
struggle for India’s independence. But
it is not necessarily so. They were extra-ordinary men (and women), those who
defied an Empire with sticks and stones, silence and non-violence, and if the
textbooks failed to evoke that sense of awe, if the teachers failed to bring
them to life, the fault lay there. Movies made up a bit of the difference – Gandhi,
I suppose, merits mention - and visits to Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar and the
Cellular Jail in Port Blair helped provide a context to my own feelings, but as
a Government proceeds with systematic erasure of history and manipulation of
memory, I wonder if the next generation will share those feelings, that sense
of both gratitude and objectivity that I like to think ours could bring to that
era.

Our final project in school was also on the freedom
struggle, the topic I had been assigned was to do with the provincial
governments, and since this was before Google made it easy to access information
– and crackpot conspiracy bullshit – I had visited a few public libraries for
books and old newspaper clippings. Along with information, what I also realised
in the course of the research was that there was so much that was left
out of the textbooks.

Of it all – and there was a lot – the most glaring
anomaly, I realised, was the legacy of Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The Qaid-E-Azam of Pakistan, the man who
divided India, the sectarian who appealed and brought out the worst in our
country and stoked its communal flames, who made a pan-India struggle into a
political ploy for his own power – he was nowhere to be found in the literature
pertaining to any period prior to 1930.

Instead, there was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, staunch
nationalist, impassioned defender of Hindu-Muslim unity, defiant of the mullahs
and the Muslim League, opposing reservations for Muslims and separate
electorates, the most prominent leader of the Congress, defender of Tilak
against sedition charges, a thorn in the side of the Empire.

But school projects come with deadlines, and in a
rush to finish, submit and collect the grade, much was forgotten or rather,
consigned to the side-lines as life moved on. I continued to look up
information when it came my way – read about Bose and Nehru, Gokhale and
Ranade, Tilak and Singh.

I read about Jinnah’s legendary speech of 1918, at
Town Hall (now known as the Asiatic Library, opposite Horniman Circle), when he
had opposed the construction of a memorial to the outgoing governor, Lord
Willingdon (a proposal made by Willingdon himself). His denunciation of not
just the governor, but the basis of British rule in India was extraordinary in
its erudition and power, and when his eighteen-year-old wife, Ruttiebai, made
her own speech from the balcony, shouting ‘We will not be slaves!’, it nearly
sparked a riot, leading the memorial to Willingdon being abandoned and a hall
being put up with Jinnah’s name on it, at Lamington Road.

And yet, this is the same man whose portrait now
hangs on the other side of the Wagah border – the wrong side, it might appear.

Jinnah and Ruttonbai Petit

Blending fact and fiction

When Jinnah often came to our house popped up
in the books Amazon recommended to me, it is therefore understandable that I was intrigued enough to buy it, and
when a recent ailment left me unable to write at length, I picked it up to
read.

The author Kiran Doshispins an intriguing tale, a piece of historical
fiction that unfolds with the pace and structure of a classic. It tells of the wealthy,
elitist Sunni muslim Sultan Kowaishi, a London-returned barrister
who strikes up a friendly rivalry with the then-leading star of the Bombay
courts, M A Jinnah, a prayer-ignoring, whisky-drinking, pork-eating
Shia. Sultan marries Rehana, a beautiful and educated girl who falls in
love with the lovable, Wodehousian rogue that he is. As Rehana spends time with
Sultan’s friends, Jinnah and Dhondav, the latter a Hindu Congressman,
she becomes drawn towards the nationalist movement, even as Sultan remains a
supporter of the Raj.

The book proceeds apace, many threads picking up and
explored, the lives of Sultan’s brother and sisters, and later, his children, explored,
even as the independence movement continues in the backdrop. Rehana joins the
Congress formally and goes on to become a staunch Gandhian, even as Sultan is
inducted into the Muslim League, and Jinnah tries to straddle both worlds,
making impassioned but futile attempts to engender Hindu-Muslim unity. Rehana
sets up a school for girls education with her best friend Tehmima. The
‘Ekta’ school inducts Jinnah on the Board of Trustees, and on his suggestion,
admits non-Muslim girls as well. But politics also begins to pull the couple imperceptibly
apart, until an unexpected piece of news drives a deeper wedge between them,
one that threatens to unravel the entire Kowaishi family. The wheels of time
move, ever forward, and the personal triumphs and tragedies of Sultan and
Rehana are dovetailed into the events of the freedom struggle, from
Jallianwallah to the Simon Comission, from the Dandi march to the Naval mutiny.

Chronicling the tragedy

The author tells the story simply but with plenty of
heart. We see the love and heartbreak of Hina Kowaishi, Sultan’s sister,and her channelling it into establishing a hospital for the poor, we
gape in horror as Madhav, Dhondav’s son, is gunned down by Dyer’s
gunfire in Amritsar and marvel at the chicanery of the British, who stoop so
low to conquer that the muck at the foundation of their towering edifices of
Empire is laid bare.

Through it all, we see Jinnah’s gradual
transformation. From vehement opposition of reservation to becoming an advocate
for ‘special rights’ for Muslims. From rejecting the concept of ‘separate
electorates’for Muslims as it would be
divisive, to unabashedly using them to gain power. From defiance of conservative
religious dogma to becoming an apologist for it and from there to taking
advantage of it to further a political goal. We see ambition tilt against the
better nature of men and come out victorious, while the tragedies of the
ordinary people – the Dhondavs and Madhavs, the Rehanas and Tehmimas – are but
footnotes in history. We mourn for the death of Ruttiebai and see dying with
her the spark of hope and reconciliation. We read with horror about thousands,
lakhs dead, becoming a statistic of Partition. We shudder at the horrors that
are wrought by the inability of three factions to come together.

The threads converge as the book draws to an end,
some are snipped off cruelly, others run out of string and some, frayed and
fragile though they become, survive. It is worth the 500-page read to find out
who, why and when. The language flows, the characters come to life and events,
real and fictional, blend into a lovely, often heart-breaking tapestry.

It ends, appropriately, with Jinnah’s death. Rehana’s
school holds a minute’s silence for their former Trustee.

“Dadi, did you know this man Jinnah?” asks her
grand-daughter, as they sit to dinner.

“Yes, darling,” she replies. “A long, long time back,
he often came to our house.”

Coda

You can find the ‘Jinnah Hall’ at Lamington Road,
even today, tucked within the offices of the Indian National Congress. The Hall
built to commend him for his defiance of the British on that day in 1918 when
he stood before the people of Bombay, including whites and policemen, and
denounced everything the Empire stood for. Feel free to marvel at it, the
legacy of a dead man entombed within the offices of a moribund political party
that does as much to drive itself to oblivion today as it did to drive out the
British Raj once. Feel free to wonder whether, long before it made the series
of mistakes that reduced it to its present state, it made a far bigger mistake
in alienating a man who was preaching Hindu-Muslim unity a decade before Gandhi
even came to India.

The plaque with his name on it was destroyed a few
years ago by Shiv Sena activists, whose grasp of history has always been
questionable.

You can also see the Asiatic Library at Horniman
Circle, in much the same condition as it must have been when it was the City’s
Town Hall. The tall white steps leading to it are a bit of a tourist attraction
now, and you will almost certainly find some young men and women taking pictures
there, enjoying the freedom their forefathers fought so hard to win. Try to
picture, instead, a forty-year-old lawyer and his new bride, defying common
sense and friendly advice, risking arrest and physical harm to rail against the
ravages of the British, on those very steps.

Eleven years later, she would be dead, lovelorn and
broken.

Thirty years later, so would he, having broken apart
the country he had once tried so hard to free.

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About Me

Percy Slacker was bitten by Schrodinger’s Cat as a child, and has since then combined a deep fear of cats with an
abiding conviction that he both exists and does not exist at the same
time. This existential doubt has led him
to grow up to be a writer while not actually being a writer.

He lives in Mumbai with his family, his book collection and a firm
conviction that modern civilization is in an interminable decline.